One of the things I’ve loved about the arc that reaches from the Mysterious Fields trilogy to Grown Wise is getting to see family patterns shift and change. Right now, we’ve had a chance to see four generations of the Fortiers and how they act and react.
The 1880s
We begin in the Mysterious Fields trilogy with Garin and Isembard’s uncle as Lord. Though their grandmother Chrodechildis is still very much head of the family. Vauquelin, her husband, had been dead for five years.
That’s the first shift. A bit more of this will be visible when I get the trilogy extras out (I’m working on it! Sometime sooner than later.)
But Vauquelin was a ritualist by training and preference. His sons and daughter are not. Vauquelin is the one who made the original agreements with Henut Landry when she arrived in Albion. He is the one who maintained the oaths and agreements for the family and estate. When he dies, that begins to shift.
Clovis has a focus on Sympathetic magic along with duelling. Bradamante has married out, but has a strong background in Flora and growing plants. Dagobert is an alchemist. Childeric has a focus on Incantation as a field, and Sigbert on duelling and materia.
It’s possible, reading the trilogy, to see how that got the family into a fair bit of trouble. It’s not that ritual is the answer to all magical problems. But the attitude a ritualist brings is different than the ones other skills bring. They begin digging a hole that’s going to be nearly impossible to climb out of.
And then there’s another problem – a particular teaching technique at Schola in the 1880s that did not do Childeric any favours. (Childeric is not the only one affected here.)
1890s through 1913
We then come to an era where Dagobert is Lord, and he and Laudine are bringing up their sons. There are challenges – Dagobert’s health limits some of what he’d like to do. They keep a lot of their interests close to home and less public. But there’s also a need to make the right show with others of the Great Families. Garin is sent off to a highly respected tutoring school, run by the Alveys. That works out the way it’s supposed to: Garin goes on to marry the eldest of the Alvey daughters. They come from one of the best families in Albion.
It’s not what anyone would call a happy marriage. But it is one where both of them understand a particular kind of commitment and service. Garin challenges for the Council unsuccessfully in 1903. Livia is successful in her Challenge in 1905, and Garin succeeds in 1907. From then on, both of them are at the peak of Albion’s society in several ways. There are a few years in that state before Laudine dies in 1911 (just after Isembard turns 21 and reaches his formal majority) and Dagobert dies in 1913.
Looking at the whole arc of the family through this point, I keep feeling like they’re stuck in amber. There are definitely good moments in there. The family tends to the land and the land magic diligently (if sometimes more by rote than by innate response to what’s specifically needed). They manage, as a family, to stop digging that hole and to start climbing out. But none of them – even Garin and Livia – manage to think about expanding beyond that.
1913 through 1940
Here we get a long period where Garin is Lord and Livia is Lady. Both of them are focused on their work for the Council. Isembard goes off to fight in the Great War. It takes him some time to figure out what he’s doing when he returns. (He would rather not think about the period between August 1917 and about August of 1923, thank you.)
Once Isembard takes up teaching in September 1924, he finds himself learning things about himself he hadn’t expected. For one thing, he truly enjoys much of the process, especially once he gets a grip on the slow progression of teaching well and building a sturdy foundation. Thesan helps him, especially as he becomes more willing to ask for that help and her perspectives.
The other thing about Thesan is that while she finds Garin and Livia intimidating, she also understands that they do not have the same hooks into her that they do into Isembard. It gives her a freedom he’s never had – and it helps her give him some of that freedom too. Certainly, their children give them a little more leverage. Especially as it becomes clear that both of them are growing to be magically skilled, curious, and extremely well-educated young people.
1940 through 1946
One of the things that’s most fascinated me in this writing is Garin’s arc. He is so deeply wounded by some of what he sensed – but didn’t understand – as a child during the events of the Mysterious Fields trilogy. His parents can’t explain it to him. (Binding oaths being what they are, as well as their own complex emotional reactions to a number of events).
Garin ends up feeling he has to constantly succeed, there is no room for failure. There’s not even room for success on different terms. It’s not until after Livia’s death that he even thinks there might be some other path forward. But there he is, with possible heirs from his brother and sister-in-law. And there is his family, who think he could perhaps do something different.
The summer of 1945 is a definite turning point. There’s a point in here that’s interesting. (Patreon readers have seen in one of the early A Fox Hunt episodes. They should be out for everyone sometime in the summer of 2025). That turning point happens when Thesan, Ursula, and Leo are staying at Arundel for the summer while Isembard is away on the Continent.
During that time, Thesan faces Garin down on a point of safety, and she makes it clear exactly how much every current teacher at Schola thinks about those safety issues, basically all the time. Her steadfast willingness to stand up to him when it matters – and the way she does it – obviously change something for Garin in terms of the family dynamics.
What changes
Later that summer (in Three Graces), it means he’s able to talk to her about if there’s something else he could be doing. More time in the alchemy lab, more time innovating, more time doing what he loves most. Of course Thesan thinks he should have that. (And by whatever standard you’re using, nearly forty years on the Council is more than enough service to the common good.)
That autumn, he gives Thesan a necklace of emeralds that had been Laudine’s – made for her and to her father’s specifications – as a token of understanding that she is in fact the matriarch of the family. And that Thesan, for all the hard work it’s taken her to get there, is doing a good job, an acknowledged job, that he accepts. (That’s in another of the extras for A Fox Hunt.)
Over at Schola, Thesan and Isembard have twenty years or so of teaching together, of doing the hard and necessary work of bringing Schola’s approaches into line with what the students of these years need (and want). They’re far more aware of places that has gone wrong (including back in Childeric’s school days), and in the gaps and holes left by two World Wars. It gives them both a sense of what needs to be fixed – as promptly as possible – and a knowledge that some changes take time and patience.
1947 and Grown Wise
It takes all of that to get to Grown Wise. Ursula is their bright, deliberate, terrifying delight of a daughter, who knows things could be better and is willing to put in the work. She’s able to set limits and boundaries with her Uncle Garin. And she’s able to be patient when he has steps forwards and back in being the sort of decent person she knows he can be.
(There are so many reasons I say that she is absolutely Isembard and Thesan’s child in the best ways. Ursula has her mother’s patience and ability to watch patterns over time, and her father’s quickness of response and skill at reading the moment. She’ll be better at both as she ages, but at 20, she’s already got a lot going for her.)